“I don’t care.”
“Thanks.” Mercedes snuggles in, tucking Frances’s always icy feet between her own.
“Aa’di aa’e’ley, Habibti.”
“Don’t worry, Mercedes.”
“Te’berini.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Goodnight, Frances. I love you.”
“Barf.”
Mercedes giggles and falls asleep.
The Demon Rum
James is doing well off the Nova Scotia Temperance Act. He’s doing even better off the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, otherwise known as Prohibition. Frances doesn’t know it for a fact but she suspects. In Our Lady of Mount Carmel schoolyard, two brothers, both named Cornelius in case one dies, flung the truth at her. “Your old man’s nothing but a bootlegger!” Frances retorted, “Oh yeah? Well your old man’s a silly bitch!” They came after her but she ran, and no one can catch Frances on the run.
Frances has already learned that boys and fishermen have a richer vocabulary than girls and nuns — even if she’s not always sure of the exact meaning of the powerful words she likes to use. She knew she wouldn’t find “bootlegger” in the dictionary, any more than she had been able to find a satisfactory entry for “bugger,” so she went to Mr MacIsaac. His red face split in a grin, he wheezed out his laugh like a busted accordion and told her what it meant, quick to add, “But your Daddy’s not a bootlegger, lass, where’d you get that idea?”
Frances figured Mr MacIsaac was just saying that to be nice. Either that or he’s stupid. Why else does he fail to notice how sticky her fingers get whenever she passes the bin of cinnamon hearts and jellybeans? Frances let Mercedes in on her theory about the true nature of Daddy’s work, but Mercedes just said “silly nonsense”.
James is a bootlegger. When he works, he works at night. He leaves the house around eleven o’clock and locks the girls inside. He lights a lantern in the shed, where his cobbling tools sit gathering dust. Then he leaves the shed too and locks the door. He drives away, leaving the light to burn all night in the window.
He goes to the mouth of a certain stream and meets the dories that row in from the boats anchored offshore on “rum row”. These boats are en route from the British colony of Newfoundland, where liquor is legal, to points down the coast as far as New York City. James carries barrel after barrel and case after case up the middle of the stream to a hiding-place. He returns the next night, loads up his automobile and makes trips from the hiding-place to his secret premises back in the woods. He is starting to feel too old for all this lifting and ferrying, however, and is considering hiring a couple of younger or poorer men. There are plenty of both kinds about these days.
One strike follows another: ’22, ’23, and just this past March of ’25 the miners walked out again. It reminds James of New Waterford’s bad old days before the war. Outside Cape Breton, the twenties are roaring. But the famous postwar boom never hit here. At least not for ordinary people. Things have gone from bad to worse. The politicians and the captains of industry blame it on that mysterious mechanism, “the world economy”. But even James recognizes this as a euphemism for “God-forsaken sons-of-bitches who took everything out of here and never put a thing back”. Many miners’ children walk to school barefoot and eat lard sandwiches soaked in water to give them substance — this during times of full employment. No one knows it yet, but Cape Breton is a dress rehearsal for the Great Depression.
It’s not surprising that bootlegging is tolerated. Who can blame a body for seeking to supplement his income a little? Or for just brewing some consolation to share with friends and family around a fiddle? And that’s what most people do. It’s unusual to find a local who sells homemade ’shine at more than cost. And it’s unusual to find someone who doesn’t have a jug stashed somewhere, if not a vat on the stove. The story goes that Father Nicholson opened Mount Carmel’s rectory door to a stranger who enquired, “Where can a fella get a drop around here, father?” And the priest replied, “Well, my son, you’ve come to the only place in town where you can’t get a drop, although I don’t know, my curate might be selling.” The few serious bootleggers tend to be good fellas — wild but not bad, and certainly not stingy or vindictive. Even the Mounties enjoy the game, no matter how often they’re outwitted, and a mutual respect flourishes. Win some, lose some.
Naturally there is a Women’s Christian Temperance League, but they are a Protestant bevy and New Waterford is a Catholic town. Even in Sydney, where there are more teetotal Protestants, the hotels serve strong drink with only the threat of now and then being charged a token fine for a first violation. A second violation shuts you down, but a proprietor would have to make himself very unpopular in order to have his twentieth violation designated a “second”.
There is no shame in bootlegging. Not the way it is practised by most people. James, however, is a professional. At his shack, in the middle of a secret clearing in the woods, he takes genuine scotch and gin, real rum, and cuts it all with his own lye-quickened concoction that bubbles day and night. He reseals the genuine liquor bottles and turns a handsome profit. It helps that he doesn’t have friends to blab to. Otherwise one thing leads to another and, before you know it, the Mountie who has just turned up at your still to purchase a drop of Christmas cheer is duty-bound, come New Year’s, to burn you down, no hard feelings.
Like the professional he is, James sells only to those most likely to pay: to several wealthy individuals who do their drinking at home and can afford a cut above the usual “recipe” of molasses, yeast and water. And to most of the hotels and blind pigs from Sydney Mines to Glace Bay — where the liquor gets diluted again. He no longer sells to miners because he has grown weary of collecting debts. James has read in the papers about spectacular outbreaks of violence down in the States, where gangs fight for control of their patch and men are shot over bad debts. But in James’s experience, all that’s usually required is a threat to tell the poor bastard’s wife. James is sick of hearing their sob stories. If their children are so hard up, they shouldn’t part with a penny for his poison. And they need look no further than James himself for a good example: he doesn’t touch a drop.
All this helps to keep James well and truly hated. Why? Because I’m not disappearing down the same drain they are. Because I have the guts and the sense to support my family.
Not only does James’s work keep meat on the table when most people are lucky to get porridge, and good clothes on his children’s backs when many go about in made-over flour sacks — the hours allow him to devote himself to what matters: Lily.
James has stopped counting his books; there are too many. Mercedes and Frances have dipped into all the crates and he encourages them. But for his own part, he barely has time to glance at the newspaper before supper, and daytime is reserved for teaching Lily.
They do a different letter of the Encyclopaedia Britannica each day for two hours. James assigns passages for Lily to memorize and he quizzes her as to comprehension. She writes miniature essays on butterflys, boxcars, Bulgaria and Big Berthas. Lily loves to learn, but most of all she loves Daddy. After book-learning, James takes Lily for drives in the automobile. Sometimes they stay away all night; like the time they went to St Ann’s and saw the home of Angus McAskill, the Cape Breton Giant. Lily saw a picture of the big man holding Tom Thumb on the palm of his hand. She was awed by the tender bond between giant and midget — glad they had each other.